Should you lie with statistics?

No. I really hate lying with statistics, for example cutting the axis of a chart to make a growth trend stronger. That is cheating. Sometimes, you are giving yourself a hard time though.

Stretching out a column chart too wide on a slide, especially when you are designing for a 16:9 wide screen format. Your impressive growth all of a sudden looks rather dull. It is fine to squeeze it back a bit, even if the graphic ends up not covering the entire screen.

Using powerful graphs to emphasize a negative trend. If you had a bad financial year, and profits turned into a loss, showing that in a line graph will look like the company is on a path to disaster. The eye extends the path downward, while the financial loss could have been a one-off event. In these cases, I go back to visualizing the data in a standard text table. Data visualization can sometimes be too powerful

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